Well, I will say that I am interested in some of the arguments Anark was bringing, particularly the unity of ends and means. But I’m not a big fan of the case he brings against the USSR, China, etc. I think there’s a theoretical disconnect there, which I suspect centers around whether or not you accept / utilize the dialectic. Anark, actually very much like S4A who he is criticizing here who also does not think China is socialist, does not utilize the dialectic when analyzing whether or not something is socialist. Can’t fault him for it since the dialectic isn’t part of anarchism (right?) but if you are going to somehow be attempting to refute Marxism, you’re going to need to touch on the dialectic otherwise the Marxist analysis is going to sound like gibberish. Instead, he just kind of responds to that gibberish strawman instead of taking on the dialectical form of the argument.
As succinctly as I can: Anark is taking a snapshot view of China and asking whether or not X or Y trait associated with capitalism is present. If those traits are still present, it’s capitalist. This is a very common take even among Marxists, but not a dialectical one. Think about it this way. Imagine looking at a still picture of a car driving down a road. You can look at all the features of the car, all the traits of the car in that snapshot, the engine, tires, interior, but it’s not going to tell you the direction it’s headed, the road it’s on, whether there is a cliff 500 meters in front of the car, etc. The internal traits of the vehicle itself don’t necessarily dictate a specific direction that it can be driven in, or a past direction that it came from. The Marxist argument is that taking a snapshot of China right now doesn’t tell you about whether it’s on the road to socialism or not, because you have to zoom out and look at the history of the country, the material conditions over time and the general tendency of those conditions to see the road the vehicle is on, the surrounding environment that the vehicle exists in. Anark didn’t respond to this point, probably because S4A himself doesn’t understand it.
But this is where the disconnect on ends-means unity comes in because my understanding is that Anark believes that the internal traits of the social machine do necessarily dictate a direction. So that by looking at its current traits you can determine something about a future state, e.g. liberatory means result in liberatory ends. The problem I’m having with that argument though is, how did Anark come to that conclusion? What gets you to ends-means unity as something that is valid and sound? What would make a Marxist accept that claim?
In Halo 1 the level 343 guilty spark was terrifying as a child because a scene basically from Aliens plays out and you’re running into this new type of enemy that is fast and hard to kill, even your normal enemies are afraid of them, you’re wandering around in this mazelike building where everything looks the same and all you run into are corpses and flood and one insane marine who kills himself in front of you, you’re running out of ammo and medpacs, there’s no obvious way out. You can only revert to last checkpoint or restart the level completely. I felt relieved to run into a covenant because it meant I was on the right track, only to kill them and get lost again. I had to play during the day with the lights on.
Also this game scared the hell out of me as a very young kid but I only really saw the intro cutscene, something about all the rust and dark setting frightened me.